many of us were familiar with this sound back in the era of dial-up but in this
age of gigabit fiber connections streaming 4k video and cars that connect
to the cloud ai in real time seems like dial-up should be a distant
memory but did you know that people still use old-school dial-up as their
main home internet connection as of 2021 well over a quarter million
homes in the united states relied on dial-up and in 2020 it was estimated
that around one percent of canadians or around 38 000 people also dialed in to
connect but hold the phone how is this possible
well it turns out that quite a few folks in rural areas don't have many other
options the main alternative to dial up in many of these places is satellite
internet which is much faster than dial-up all you need is a clear view of
the sky to get a broadband signal so it's available from at least one
provider in most remote locales but that's about where the advantages end
although satellite internet is high speed in the sense that it isn't dial up
it's still much slower per dollar than the average fixed connection like cable
or fiber basic plans tend to start at around 65 bucks a month just for
10 to 25 megabits per second plus you
often have to pay initial and or monthly costs for the equipment
spacex's starlink promises faster speeds but had even higher rates and an initial
600 fee for hardware i guess elon has to
come up with that twitter money from somewhere satellite internet is also
notoriously sensitive to the weather much like satellite tv and usually has
high latency making activities like online gaming a real chore but even if
you can put up with that it's simply cost prohibitive for some folks in
underserved areas especially considering some dial-up providers now even provide
a fixed number of hours of internet access for free each month
the low cost of dial up also means that devices like atms and card readers which
don't need much bandwidth to begin with still often have a dial up connection at
least as a backup but hold please
what about dsl it runs over plain old phone lines and is much faster than dial
up so why don't people in remote areas just use that we'll tell you right after we
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good although higher speed dsl can run over phone wires it requires specialized
expensive equipment at each end compared to traditional dial up
because it's slower than cable or fiber many isps are killing off dsl because
they don't want to deal with the upkeep costs which has caused some controversy
since there are people in outlying areas that rely on it to connect to the
internet at respectable speeds not to mention fiber deployments tend to reach
wealthier areas first cost is also the reason rural areas tend
to be underserved in the first place the low population density and vast tracts
of land mean that cable companies have hang-ups about building expensive
infrastructure to every home it's the same reason many of these same
houses can't even get cable tv as if they'd want to these days and of course
this isn't the late 90s where the internet was a mere novelty or luxury
it's a practical necessity to participate in modern society so many
areas with limited options for internet access are losing population giving the
isps even less of a reason to serve the folks who stay behind
but the hope is fixed wireless technologies where an internet signal is
delivered to a home via a cell network could help bridge this digital divide in
the years to come as large mobile carriers continue to build out more
towers it'll take time and money but it could
end up being more cost effective than laying cables everywhere
and a lot quieter than listening to google dig up your backyard thanks for
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